The more I begin to read about business ethics, the more it seems to become an essential factor of business strategy. That being said, the public and the government for that matter, do not seem to agree with this statement. In order to enforce ethics into the workplace, the government has created something called CSR (corporate social responsibility) to insure that corporations are meeting the right ethical standards. This would seem like a reasonable and perhaps necessary idea, but is the government truly accountable for these regulations? Many corporations already have various responsibilities which force them to make ethical decisions. According to Elanie Sternberg, there are two main things that insure ethics for business’s: ”ordinary decency and distributive justice”. For example, if you are a dishonest corporation, then you are lacking ’ordinary decency’ and are therefore unethical. A corporation with an unethical reputation will have a hard time ”borrowing, obtaining working capital, or forming relationships with customers”. There are already penalties that exist for unethical behaviour in the natural business world. Without ethics, a business cannot carry on. There is no need to hold government accountable for what should be a managerial responsibility to the owners.
Resources:
http://www.economist.com/node/3555286
http://www.economist.com/node/3577141